Gadgetory

I'm Paul Sloan with cnet and i'm here at CES talking to eric schweig who is designed these robotic toys modular robots show us what they are tell us what they do all right this is cubelets and it's a modular robotic construction kit for kids like we used to play with Legos and erector sets and we were kids and these are construction kits with all sorts of robotic elements built in a bunch of different cubes they all do different things the black blocks or sensor blocks like a temperature sensor a light sensor or a distance sensor that can detect my hands right the clear blocks are action blocks so they do things that like the outputs like a speaker block or this flashlight block or a bar graph block with a little block with wheels that's driving around one of these guys and all the colorful blocks in between are thinking books so they're like little bits of intelligence that you might embed in between the inputs okay so what kind of things can these robot to do once you build on it sounds like you can build them in any way you really want put them together in any way mobile robots the drive around on the table you can create robots that communicate with each other you can make a robot to drive until its senses the edge of the table and stops but basically you're building additively so we'll start out with maybe the simplest possible robot you can build say one of these one sensor a light sensor and one actuator a bar graph cover up the light sensor and the bar graph goes down then you can add some intelligence in there a pink block is an inverter blog put it in between and it reverses the behavior cover up the light sensor and the bar graph goes up so it's building intelligence additively of the robotics entity and then what's the end product put the end product little robots to drive around flash chase each other and little competitions with very design interactive sculpture or create a security system for your room that sounds a siren when your sister steals your diary so I've been at this booth a lot today it looks like there's been intense interest how long does it take to get one of they cost it's insanity so right now we're taking pre-orders we're sort of borrowing money from our customers to fund our next round of manufacturing it's 160 bucks for a starter kit of six and I think if you pre-order now I think we're shipping around April thanks so much thank you I'm Paul Sloan with seen it and we've been talking to Eric like art of modular robotics